I’ve done a great deal of research into the regency era in London, England. I know where I want my character. But I want my other character to meet him and she is in the wrong place (but she needs to be there). Keep in mind, she can’t just hop in a car and drive there. He is in Hyde Park (near Grosvenor Square) and she at Hatchards (a bookstore). It is imperative that she meet him but the closest reasonable park for her to walk to from Hatchards would be Green Park. This is not a park that is mentioned much in Regency fiction and I’m wondering how important it is to keep locations accurate. Could I get away with calling Green Park, Hyde Park? If I fudged the parks would it matter to anyone outside England? Probably not. But within London? Yeah, probably. What do you do with location problems? Or problems with characters who aren’t cooperating?
If Green Park closest to Hatchards, I’d say use Green Park. My understanding is that Green Park created and named as such before Regency Period. Many people world wide know where Hatchards book shop is relative to Green and Hyde Parks–not just British.
I am probably crazy for thinking no one would know about Green Park. And you are right. Everyone knows where Hatchards is. Thanks! I did change it to Green Park at one point and then some welling meaning person asked “Why aren’t you using Hyde Park? It’s more well known.” And she got me spiralling. She had never heard of Green Park. Hence my indecision.
That’s where you draw line, IMHO. If the limiting factor is the reader’s knowledge, do whatever. You may or may not go with a more well-known term for clarity’s sake. But that also may eliminate some flavor and a “learning opportunity”. But if it’s outright wrong, that’s a problem. That drives some people really mad. Depends on your audience.
I have no advice to give, but I was intrigued and asked Gemini for online resources for people who might be writing “period pieces” and who might want a “time machine-like” accuracy to the historical details of their setting.
Oh, my, it’s jumping down the rabbit-hole time!
This is what I found, and my apologies if you already knew of these resources:
The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 35 years ago and contains more than 200,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from around 1550 to the present.
Discover history through OldMapsOnline
Browse historical places and search for old maps with timeline.
Discover Europe’s digital cultural heritage
Search, save and share art, books, films and music from thousands of cultural institutions
The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise the British Library’s vast collection of newspapers.
What makes this project so special?
We are scanning millions of pages of historical newspapers and making them available online for the first time ever.You can now search hundreds of millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title and watch your results appear in an instant.
Compare this with hours of painstaking manual searching through hard copies or microfilm (often requiring a visit to the British Library in London or Yorkshire) and it is easy to appreciate the ground-breaking nature of this project.
The British Newspaper Archive contains around three million pages of newspaper content originally funded as part of a £3m contribution from JISC. This was an important initiative that contributed greatly to the British Library’s digitisation of their historic newspapers.
We are entering a new era of scholarship. An era that requires more collaboration. More transparency. More curiosity. That’s why HathiTrust exists — to lead this era by empowering a diverse collective of research and teaching libraries from around the globe. Our digital library preserves the published record for durable, long-term, and lawful access, stewarded in partnership with the academic institutions supporting our work.
Our story.
HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
And try the search term: “Museum Open Access Collections”
And again, apologies from me if none of this was new to you.
Green Park today is just across Hyde Park Corner from Hyde Park – see Google Maps. In Regency London, they were even closer. Here’s a random map of Regency London: Location Map of Georgian and Regency London - Risky Regencies
No, you cannot get away with calling Green Park Hyde Park. Anyone with basic knowledge of London, including visitors to Buckingham Palace, will know the difference.
That said, Hatchards is just a short walk down Piccadilly from both Green Park and Hyde Park. You then have the opportunity to send your character up Park Lane or through Hyde Park to the rendezvous. Alternatively, you could send them through Mayfair via Berkeley Square – it’s always been a very affluent area.
The distances here are very small, well under a kilometre. A carriage would not be prohibitive, perhaps a Hackney (haquenée) carriage.
No problem. I have seen these maps, but I do appreciate you taking the time. Thank you!
I was just on that site today and came to the same conclusion. Thank you!
The British Newspaper Archive is very useful, not least because it’s a great way of absorbing contemporary language and style, as well the conventions.
A minor example: I was doing some research into Chester in the Second World War, and was surprised to find that the convention for describing street / road names has completely changed in the intervening 80 years… E.g. This is from a court report from the Chester Chronicle in January 1939:
MET TWO IRISHMEN, HE SAID
Pleading “Guilty” to being drunk in Northgate-street [my emph], Samual Cook (25), of no fixed abode was sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment at Chester Police Court on Wednesday.
All streets, roads, avenues, places, squares, etc, are described this way, yet I was born only twenty years later and cannot remember ever seeing this convention, so it must have died out at some point, but when?
The other thing you notice is just how profligate the editors are with punctuation – full stops are everywhere in abbreviations to the extent that it reads very fussily to modern UK English eyes (much more so even than formal American newspaperese, which looks old-fashioned to us nowadays.)
The A.R.P. Group held its New Year Party on Monday at the Headquarters of the 4th Chester Group. Before the party the Group was expected Col. W. A. V. Churton, Chief A.R.P. Warden for Chester. The Group was in charge of Asst. Dist Commissioner H. H. Philips, G.S.M’s H. Pennington, G. E. Williams, and C. C. Bounds and S.M. R. Ardern.
I count 24 full stops there that wouldn’t appear a couple of decades or so later, not to mention the spaces between the initials in names.
This is all very minor, of course – and possibly boring to everybody else… – but I find it fascinating. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see this in Victorian text, of course, but I was surprised how late this style survived.
I find it fascinating as well! I’ve been researching my family tree and have found newspaper articles on relatives from almost as far back as I’ve been researching and yes, the punctuation is crazy.
I think readers of historical fiction appreciate accurate locations, especially in a setting as well documented as Regency London. Rather than renaming Green Park, I’d look for a believable reason to bring one character to Hyde Park. A small plot adjustment is likely to feel more natural than changing a real location.
Thank you! I’ve decided to keep them in Green Park. After reviewing some maps of the area at the time, it works best to keep them there.
This is one of those moments where history can actually improve the plot. The limits of travel and timing in the Regency era create opportunities for suspense that modern stories don’t have.
So true! My story is looking so much better now.